The ides of March has come and gone this year, but this Sunday, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon have conspired to present us with an EXCURSUS(word entry P. 72, 159, 105, 58, 2, 90, 45, 136) from Palm Sunday, a bloody affair in the Forum known as the assassination of Julius Caesar. Acrostics are a lot of “bookkeeping” so to speak -- a good amount of time is consumed transferring letter by letter, alphabetically and numerically, from line to square or from square to line. To add to this difficulty, The New York Times allows the most meager area in which to enter answers to the defined words listed alphabetically. Nevertheless, the acrostic is a puzzle I admire when considering the difficulty in construction that it must entail. Not only do we get a quote of some worth (in most cases), but also the author of the quote’s name and the title of the publication (via the first letter of the words defined). Guessing a word from the majority of letters achieved in the grid is not always possible and sometimes very misleading due to the fact that many of these constructions utilize odd quotations --- so in this case we have (in part) “HAD HE SAID HWWXEUXWH INSTEAD…” Now that's an answer that slays me! Sunday, bloody Sunday!